Syria sidesteps sanctions by turning to China for Internet bandwidth

And at least one Syrian ISP site finds a home on US servers.

Censorship and government monitoring aren’t the only problems facing Syrian Internet users. There have been frequent, recent shutdowns of all Internet traffic crossing the Syrian border over the last few months, accompanying dramatic changes in how the country connects to the rest of the world. With growing international diplomatic pressure and sanctions against Syria, the Syria Telecommunications Establishment (which controls the country’s Internet infrastructure) has increasingly taken its network business somewhere it’s wanted: China. But despite sanctions, some Syrian ISPs still maintain a presence in the US, with the largest hosting its homepage on a server in Chicago.

In April, the Obama administration announced sanctions against Syriatel, the Syrian telecommunications company, for its role in "tracking and targeting citizens for violence." Syriatel owns SAWA, Syria’s largest ISP. While that has prevented US telecommunications companies such as Cogent and Level 3 from doing business with SAWA, it hasn’t stopped the Syrian company from using some US Internet services.

While doing research for this story, Ars discovered the website for Computer Engineering Corporation, SAWA’s technology services company, was hosted on a server at HostForWeb’s Chicago data center. A company spokesperson for HostForWeb was not available for comment. While the site appeared to be down 15 minutes after we placed a call to the company, a ping of the site and a lookup of the IP address still resolved to a host at the company. At this article's publication, the site appeared to be functioning normally again.

A screen shot of an nslookup on cec.sy, the website of Syrian ISP SAWA.

Other countries have been following suit, making it harder for Syria to buy bandwidth. But China has not imposed sanctions on Syria, and continues to build its economic relationship with the Assad regime. As a result, Internet monitoring firm Renesys reports that over the past few days, the majority of Syria’s Internet traffic has been routed through the Hong Kong-based telecom provider PCCW Global, which owns a significant amount of network capacity in the Middle East and Europe. Syria is connected to Lebanon, Egypt, and Cyprus by way of undersea cables; PCCW has points of presence in Egypt and Cyprus, and is partnering with other telcos in the ownership of several Mediterranean submarine cables.

The changes have been solidified during a series of Internet shutdowns. On August 18 and 19, STE "withdrew all 61 of its networks from the global routing table" several times, Renesys’ Doug Madory wrote in the company’s blog.

The shift came as Syria severely cut back its traffic through Telecom Italia and dropped its connections entirely in mid-August to Turk Telecom, which until recently had provided most of Syria’s international Internet bandwidth. PCCW now provides about 75 percent of Syria’s international connectivity, with all but a small fraction of the balance being provided by Deutsche Telekom, and India-based Tata.

Enlarge/ A chart showing the percentage of transit bandwidth provided to Syria by international telecom providers. PCCW is in grey.

A set of tests by Ars Technica confirmed Renesys’ findings, at least as far as traffic between Syria and the US. Connections from the US to Syrian ISPs’ name servers, as well as to the Syrian National Agency for Network Services (Syria’s top-level domain administrator) routed through PCCW’s network through the company’s peering connection in New York City. A secondary domain for Syriatel, syriatel.com.sy, routed through Deutsche Telekom, but accessing it over the Web brought up a Parallels Plesk default administration page.

PCCW Global’s network doesn’t route all of Syria’s traffic through China itself, and isn’t subject to China’s "Great Firewall" filtering. But the US sanctions provide Chinese companies such as Huawei (which maintains a Facebook page for its Damascus office) a huge business opportunity to expand their market in the Middle East—and bring along their own deep packet inspection and other network surveillance technology for the Assad regime to use.

Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat